The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to a data management system and, more specifically, but not exclusively, to a system for managing health information.
There exist reasons to limit access to sensitive electronic information. Some examples of sensitive electronic information are a person's name, a person's address, an identification number such as a passport number, a Social Security number or a national identification number, a bank account identifier, and a health record. Some reasons to limit access to the sensitive electronic information are business related, for example to protect business interests of a business entity. Some other reasons are regulatory, for example regulations governing distribution of and access to health information. An example of a regulation regarding health information is United States Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).
Some existing data management systems control access to sensitive electronic information by isolating the data management system from other systems. In such systems the sensitive electronic information is stored in dedicated storage devices, and processed by dedicated hardware processors. Some such systems comprise a central database, implementing access control lists to restrict access to data stored in the database. In some such systems only explicitly authorized computers, identified by a network address or a network device port, may retrieve the sensitive electronic information.
The term “cloud computing” refers to delivering one or more hosted services, often over the Internet. Examples of a hosted service delivered over the Internet are a compute resource such as a virtual machine (VM), storage and access to an application. Cloud computing enables an entity such as a company to consume the one or more hosted services as a utility, rather than having to build and maintain computing infrastructures in house. There is an increase in the amount of data management systems implemented using cloud computing for data storage and data management applications. Possible advantages of a cloud implementation of a data management system compared to a system comprising dedicated storage devices and dedicated hardware processing resources include reduced cost of storage and computing resources, simpler storage management, easier expansion, better backup and recovery, and decreased Information Technology (IT) maintenance costs. Cloud computing is characterized by sharing one or more pools of configurable system resources between one or more software applications. A data management system using cloud computing may be susceptible to unintentional or malicious data leaks.